Bay officials said there would be few hurdles in integrating the x2
technology into the 5000 MSX platform. "I don't think it's a significant
challenge," said Jonathan Sieg, vice president of the company's signal
processing group. "From a technical perspective, it's not that difficult a
thing to do."

Bay has yet to make a serious dent in the Internet Service Provider (ISP)
market for remote access gear. The company announced last week that Stephen
Pearse will become the new head of its Internet-Telecom business group, a
sign that the Santa Clara, California-based networking vendor may be ready
to make a push for a piece of the enterprise remote access hardware pie.

The new x2-compatible modules for the 5000 MSX will ship in September. A
standard guaranteeing interoperability between the two divergent 56-kbps
modem standards is expected to be finalized by early next year.